


Last Gasp

by hdctbpal



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 15:46:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1904700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hdctbpal/pseuds/hdctbpal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard pushes the Normandy's crew too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 00:00:23

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Last Gasp](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/61599) by Drew Gardner. 



> Thank you for reading and thank you to readers who have left kudos!

00:00:23

Shepard had heard somewhere that the cliche of "your life flashing before your eyes" was in fact a survival mechanism - that the brain, confronted with imminent death, was frantically sifting through all its accumulated memories in search of an answer to the present danger.

She had since decided that all of it - the light at the end of the tunnel, seeing long-dead friends and family welcoming you to the afterlife - was crap for consumption by the sheep who watched daytime holovision. Unlike the charlatans who appeared on Sha'ira's talk show to tell their bullshit near-death stories, Shepard really had died.

And none of that stuff had happened to her. There was only the rush of air leaving her ruptured suit and taking all sound with it, the red-hot twin stabbing pains of her lungs trying to draw oxygen from vacuum, the feel of black velvet being wrapped around her eyes and brain as consciousness faded.

00:00:22

But it was happening now. Memories were racing through her head, not at random but in chronological order, as if played on an old-fashioned tape reel turned up to million revolutions a minute. It should have been an indecipherable blur, but somehow it felt as if she could stop and examine every single frame in limitless detail.

Maybe it was because she had more warning this time. Or maybe it was because she had already died this way once, and knew how awful it was going to be, and her mind was ready to seize on anything else to avoid facing it.

She tried to stop the parade of images, but in her panic, she couldn't. She squeezed her eyes shut, blotting out the relentless countdown displayed on the bulkhead beside her, but that only made the images brighter and sharper. She moaned, and a trickle of saliva escaped the corner of her mouth, held open by the gag. 

00:00:21

"Look, lady, we got no beef with you - "

"You thought you could sneak across our turf without paying? You and your honey there are gonna be a little lesson to the rest of your bitch gang. Watch real close, sweetie. This is what happens when you diss the Reds."

"Jesus no wait no god no - "

00:00:20

"Ma'am, they're in prepared positions up there. They have artillery and they have every piece of cover on that hillside pre-sighted by now. No way we can take them without heavy losses, and they're just the rear guard! In six hours the fleet will be here and we can get an orbital strike - "

"And let the rest of those batarian bastards get away, after what they did to that colony? We're going after them, and fuck the losses. I'll lead the first wave myself, Sergeant, if you'd rather stay here and clean your vagina."

00:00:19

"We have bigger things to do than slum around Ilium looking for your bitch sister. Hell, if I found out I was related to you I'd run away too."

"Look, Taylor volunteered to go into that shaft. End of story."

"Boo hoo, you had a shit childhood. I watched my friends die in gang wars and my whole unit bit it on Torfan. Sob stories are like assholes, Zero. Everyone has one. Go write a sad poem about it or something."

"When this is over you two can tear each other apart. Until then save your hate for the Collectors."

And they had. They'd also saved it for her, biding their time until the Collectors were dead.

00:00:18

"So Archangel was Vakarian - no shit. Would've been nice if your vaunted intel people had told me that. Then I'd have gone in and gotten him."

"Like I have time to worry about some fucking merc feud. Hell, Massani, I'd be happy if they all killed each other and saved me the trouble."

"I liked him, but he might have changed his mind and cured the genophage someday, and we sure as hell don't need that. It's best this way."

"The deadliest assassin in the galaxy, taken out by a falling strut. Christ."

00:00:17

"I wasted our time on this and he didn't even have anything that could help us with the geth. If he had, maybe I'd have covered for him. Besides, you heard those maniacs - they're going to throw their lives away trying to retake Rannoch. Again. You want to be dragged into that?"

"The hell am I supposed to do with this thing? Sell it to Cerberus. No, wait. Get in touch with Xen and find out what she's willing to pay. Let them bid against each other. About time the quarians did us a favor for once."

"Your daughter will be more useful to me. And less of a fucking tight-ass."

"She was a goddamn cat burglar. What good would she be against hordes of Collectors? Besides, she got me into that mess. The least she could do was get me out. And we got the Locust. I call that a success."

00:00:16

Shepard awoke with a start, from a drugged sleep full of nightmares. She had dreamt she was buried alive, the slimy mud seeping into her mouth, pressed by the weight of the earth above, then hardening into a painful mass that smothered her cries for help.

They had come for her the middle of the night watch. Lawson, of course, was in charge. With her were Jack and Grunt. And behind them was - at first, Shepard didn't recognize her.

"Don't you remember me, Shep? You left me behind on Beckenstein. As a present for Hock, in return for your escape."

00:00:15

Kasumi's once attractive face was now seamed with jagged red scars. One of them went through an eye, which was covered by a patch. The dark hair had been shaved, and beneath the hood were thick bandages where the graybox had been crudely extracted. The voice was different. Then Shepard saw the incisions in the throat, and realized she was hearing an implanted voicebox.

Kasumi followed her glance. "Yes, he severed the vocal chords after he tired of hearing my screams." Her artificial voice was chillingly matter-of-fact. "After I escaped, your friend Mr. Illusive called me up and said you'd had a little falling-out. Miranda sent me the Normandy's itinerary, and I slipped aboard at your last supply stop. Since you keep your cabin locked at night, I just cloaked myself, followed you right in, put the sedatives in your drink, and waited. Once you were out, I disabled all the locks, alarms, and booby traps - very amateur stuff, I'm afraid, Shep - and let these other ladies in."

"Hey," Grunt said.

00:00:14

"For fuck's sake," Shepard had said. "At least Okeer might have been useful. He got himself killed for this? Leave him in the tank for now."

So Lawson released the krogan - Grunt, he called himself now - instead, and quickly won his loyalty. "She is my battlemaster," the brute said proudly as Shepard tried and failed to twist her right leg free of his iron grasp. "Genetic perfection, like mine."

00:00:13

At one point, Shepard tried crying out to EDI, though what the AI could do to help her, she did not know - fire off a distress call?

"Her loyalty rests on the flip of a quantum bit, remember?" Lawson said. "Which I've flipped. Joker might have unshackled her, but there are still command codes hardwired into her - put there by the Illusive Man and entrusted only to me...with just this contingency in mind."

Most of the crew had been liquefied by the Collectors, so Miranda had no trouble clearing the command deck beforehand. There was no one to watch as the four of them hauled Shepard, struggling and squealing, to the forward airlock.

Joker and Chakwas, Lawson explained, were secured in the women's restroom - one of the few enclosed spaces on the ship that offered no access to any vital systems, nor to any HVAC ducts large enough to allow escape - in other words, an ideal makeshift brig. They were Alliance, and not to be trusted, so she couldn't simply drop them off at the next convenient port. They would be put to work helping to salvage the remains of the Collector Base that Shepard had blown up.

00:00:12

After that, Miranda continued, the Illusive Man decided that Shepard had made herself more of a liability than an asset. Her crew, seething with accumulated hostility at her habitual ill treatment of them, were inclined to agree. Somehow, Shepard had forgotten that she no longer had the Alliance military to back her up, but she obviously had never really expected this to happen. Never realized that she had pushed this many people this far. She realized it now, too late.

Chambers, still recovering from her near death in a Collector processing pod, was easily cowed into terrified submission by a whispered warning from Lawson of what would happen if she didn't cooperate. She quickly agreed to be secured to a bed in the sickbay and sedated.

"So don't worry," Miranda told Shepard with an evil smile. "No one will be interrupting your little going-away party."

00:00:11

The restraining gear was freshly bolted to the airlock deck, the weld seams still glowing a muted, angry red. Jack and Tali had done the work together. The design was based on Jack's memories of Cerberus experiments on Pragia. It was reinforced with carbon nanotubing and able to withstand even Shepard's cybernetically augmented strength.

A hinge in the middle of the upright bar allowed them to tilt Shepard's body at various angles, all of them painful, differing only in the way they hurt. At one point, they bent her backward until her back was almost parallel with the deck, the hinge digging sharply into her spine and her thighs screaming with the strain.

After Shepard was firmly and painfully secured, Miranda ordered EDI to begin the countdown. To Shepard's right, the letters and numbers flared to holographic life on the aft bulkhead of the airlock. Then they began changing:

12:00:00  
11:59:59  
11:59:58  
...

Behind her, above her, appearing upside down and reversed, she could see the red letters:

DANGER. VACUUM.

She screamed into the gag.

00:00:10

Over the next several hours, they all had their turns at her, in her, two and often three at a time. Relieving basic urges, which were magnified by the terrors of their recent mission and the miracle of survival - for those who had survived. But also venting their long-suppressed fury. Taking their revenge for every wrong and insult she had given them over the last six months, for the comrades who weren't coming home thanks to her ruthlessness and contempt.

The gag was removed only to be replaced by a cock or a vagina - some alien, some human - Shepard soon lost track.

Kasumi sweetly promised her that if she bit anyone, they would remove her teeth - minus anesthetic.

So she didn't.

The men would take a thick and painful fistful of her red hair, brutally jerking her head to one side or the other - sometimes so hard that the joints creaked in her neck and sparks of pain shot up into the back of her skull - as they forced her chapped and torn lips over their cocks.

The women, too, all insisted on receiving oral pleasure: Jack first, then Miranda, then Morinth, then Kasumi. Shepard was straight, and the sight and smell of another woman's pussy jammed roughly into her face was enough to make her gag at first. However, she found the forced blowjobs even more degrading and much more painful, so she soon forced down her inhibitions. Morinth even sarcastically complimented her by saying she was a born lesbian.

Tali was last. "My airways will be full of crud for weeks after this," the quarian said with a smirk in her voice as she opened a hidden seam that ran vertically down the lower front of her suit, "but it will be totally worth it." Shepard's jaw muscles ached furiously at this point, but she managed to lick the quarian to sticky satisfaction three times in the course of only twenty minutes. 

00:00:09

In fact, she did bite Grunt, but that was in panic, as his huge scaly member forced its way into her mouth, and it was doubtful he even felt it. It fit - barely.

He dislocated her jaw twice. The first time, Miranda made him withdraw so she could administer a mild dose of subdermal medi-gel to repair the damage. The others amused themselves for the moment by taking turns forcing their rough fingers in and out of her sopping pussy and unlubricated ass, or pinching and tweaking her exposed nipples.

The second time, Grunt was too close to his orgasm, and not even Jack's biotics could pry him loose until he finished. Shepard passed out from the white-hot agony of it, and then nearly choked to death when he came.

That was what finally convinced them to change her position. The unoiled hinge of the upright bar squealed in protest as they bent her forward through nearly 180 degrees and slammed her face hard against the deck.

They let her have a minute to cough and gasp out the syrupy blue krogan ejaculate Grunt had shot into the back of her throat and which she had swallowed or inhaled. An amazed Kasumi giggled that there must be at least a pint of it.

The first of many, thanks to Grunt's quadruple testicles.

00:00:08

The new position made it hard for them to use her mouth, so the ball gag was quickly reinserted, though Shepard continued to sputter and drool a mixture of saliva and krogan semen around it. Meanwhile, it offered up her pussy and ass for easy access.

Miranda was first.

The dark-haired woman smirked as she attached the large strap-on she had bought on Ilium for just this event. It was one of the shockingly expensive high-end models that interfaced directly with her nervous system - the surface was covered with billions of nanosensors and beneath it was a mass effect microfield generator that mapped every simulated tactile sensation to actual nerve impluses in her clit.

Miranda groaned with pleasure as she gripped the strap-on in both hands, firmly pressed the head between Shepard's vaginal lips, and then thrust. From around the ball gag in Shepard's mouth came a thin wail that was nonetheless clearly brimming with humiliation and anger at the violation.

That only drove Miranda on. She slowly withdrew, until she was almost all the way out, and then pushed her hips forward again. She leaned a little farther forward with each thrust, penetrating a little more deeply, shifting a little more of her weight onto Shepard.

00:00:07

Shepard's bare nipples stiffened as the older woman's weight ground them roughly into the airlock deck, which was icy cold and speckled with machine oil and the grime of a thousand worlds. Soon they were rubbed sore and felt painfully sensitive to every particle of grit.

At last, with one final thrust, Miranda was buried to the hilt. She let out another moan, louder this time, as she began to step up the pace. Soon her face was partly hidden by strands of thick dark hair that clung to it, soaked with sweat.

Zaeed and Grunt, who had already spent themselves inside Shepard's mouth, found themselves quickly getting hard again as they watched the former XO rape her former captain. Unlike with the men, no one urged Lawson to hurry up so they could have their turn.

What seemed to Shepard like hours later, Miranda went rigid atop her and gave several short cries of pleasure as she reached her climax. It was nearly another minute before Miranda was able to crawl off of her. Shepard sighed with relief; it felt as though a burden of a thousand pounds had just been removed from her, though Lawson probably weighed less than a hundred and twenty.

Miranda removed the strap-on - not without a sigh as it disconnected from her nervous system - and handed it to Morinth. The Ardat-Yakshi had agreed not to meld with Shepard - she knew that Jack and Miranda together were more than a match for her if she got out of line - but she could certainly partake of the pleasures of the flesh if not the mind. And she did, cruelly and repeatedly.

00:00:06

Only after Shepard's vagina had been thoroughly stretched was Grunt allowed to enjoy it. They didn't let him use her ass at all, for fear she would pass out again. As Miranda put it, they wouldn't want her to miss anything.

But that didn't mean someone else couldn't use her there. They raised her far enough off the floor for Grunt to slide beneath. After he had slowly forced himself to the hilt inside her, Tali donned the now dripping strap-on and mounted Shepard from the rear.

Shepard tried with all the strength she had left to prevent the intrusion - she had never allowed anyone to fuck her there - but Tali simply leaned forward, pinning Shepard between herself and Grunt, and let her weight do the work for her, forcing the invader into Shepard's ass inch by painful inch. By the sounds Shepard was making, Tali half expected her to bite through her gag.

"A Shep sandwich," Kasumi giggled.

"Better than anything from the galley these days," Zaeed said.

00:00:05

"Okay, that's twice now. Get off her, Zorah. My turn." With a last shiver of pleasure, Tali pulled the soiled strap-on from Shepard's ass, disconnected it, and started to hand it to Jack.

"Fuck no. Later." Jack slapped the offered member away. She held up the instrument she'd chosen from her box of toys. "Hold on to her, Grunt."

Shepard could hardly go anywhere as it was, but her sweaty, half-naked body jerked as she tried to twist away anyway. But Grunt's cock was too long and hard and the restraints didn't give her enough room to lift herself clear of it, leaving her effectively impaled on it until his erection subsided. His arms, as thick and rough as tree trunks, fell across her upper back and crushed her breasts against his massive chest. She forgot about trying to move as she gasped for the breath he was squeezing out of her.

"Easy. Don't squish her."

"Don't squish," Grunt echoed blankly - clearly, most of his concentration was occupied by the sensations of Shepard's soft vagina around his scaly cock - but he did relax his grip slightly. 

Shepard yelped and jerked again as she felt the first sting of Jack's tattoo gun pierce the taut skin of her lower back. She was afraid of needles of any kind, and had no tattoos - she had even refused to get the customary N7 one after graduation.

"Fuckin' don't move, Shepard, or it'll hurt worse," Jack promised. "All right, guys, what should I draw first?"

00:00:04

When the countdown reached one hour, the seven of them still hadn't completely spent themselves on her. But Miranda announced they were done - she wanted Shepard to have the last hour to think.

"Goddamn bleedin' shame to waste such a nice piece", Zaeed said. "We can always just come back and have some more fun with 'er tomorrow. Don't 'ave to open the airlock till we start getting bored." He laughed nastily as he chain-lit his next cigar. 

But Miranda adamantly refused to grant the condemned any reprieve, even for the pleasure of her executioners. "If I do that even once," Miranda said, "she'll think it's all a joke. That we're going to let her go. Well, we aren't."

She herded them all out of the airlock, which now stank with the sweat, semen, vaginal fluids, urine, and their counterparts from a half dozen different species. Grumbling and cursing, they went. Miranda and Shepard were alone.

00:00:03

Miranda reached out and ran her fingers through Shepard's hair. Her former captain, though she expected more pain from the touch - the whole of her body was pain, it seemed - didn't flinch away from it. She was past that.

But Miranda just ruffled Shepard's hair and said, "Would you like me to take the gag out?"

Shepard nodded, her eyes widening with sudden hope.

Miranda reached behind Shepard's head and opened the clasp. The gag fell away from Shepard's gasping mouth, connected by a thick line of drool. It took a moment before Shepard could even make the cramped muscles of her jaw work. She closed and opened her mouth a couple of times, feeling as though she hadn't done so in years.

As soon as she could, Shepard said, "Look - Miranda - "

00:00:02

"Shhh." Miranda reached for Shepard's hair again and this time she did tighten her grip, until Shepard gasped. With her other hand, she reached for a bottle of clear liquid and pressed its mouth to Shepard's.

As desperately as Shepard wanted to beg for her release, the needs of her body overrode her - the relentless exertions of the past eleven hours, plus the drugs she was given beforehand, had severely dehydrated her. She drank greedily, until the bottle was empty. She didn't even know what the liquid was, but it tasted like the electrolyte solution they often drank during training or after a battle.

"That's better," Miranda said. "We don't want you to faint, that's all." With that, she put the bottle down and picked up the ball gag from the puddle of drool it lay in.

"Miranda - no - "

"Shhh." Miranda jammed the ball gag back into Shepard's mouth. Her fingers deftly secured the strap behind Shepard's head once more.

She knelt beside Shepard. Shepard tried to turn her head to look at her, but Miranda tightened her grip even more, forcing Shepard to look straight ahead. Miranda leaned forward so her lips brushed Shepard's ear. Her breath tickled Shepard's cheek as she whispered. 

For the first time in her ordeal, tears welled in Shepard's green eyes as she listened.

Afterward, Miranda kissed Shepard on the cheek, her tongue darting out to lap up the lone tear that hung there. Then she stood and walked out of the airlock, and Shepard was alone with her panicked thoughts.

00:00:01

Her death would be doubly hellish this time, because she didn't have to imagine what it was like to be spaced. She knew. She remembered every agonizing detail. This time, she wouldn't even be able to struggle, to exhaust herself and end it more quickly. Even her augmented strength couldn't elicit so much as a creak from the reinforced restraints.

She was cold, freezing. Her skin felt clammy. There wasn't so much as a drop of sweat rolling down her face.

She tasted something salty, and then yelped as her torn lips blazed like fire. It was a tear, she realized. She fancied she could already feel it freezing to her face in the hard black vacuum.

She felt hyperaware, sensing everything in ultra-sharp detail. The red emergency lights looked like images on a holoscreen with lens flare added, more real than reality. The countdown was like a ten-story neon advertisement burning through a rainy night on Ilium. The various stinks that had accumulated in the cramped, stuffy airlock over the last hours were like a river of effluvia seeping into her lungs, drowning her.

The last second seemed to stretch farther and farther, until it seemed the countdown had stopped, as if her consciousness had finally accelerated to infinite speed, so the rest of the universe would take eternity to catch up to her.

Then she realized, through the blur of her tears, that the digits weren't moving any more. They had stopped.

They had stopped!

She blinked, forced herself to focus. Then she saw why they had stopped.

00:00:00

There came the sound of motors humming to life. A clanking sound, probably a gear turning, then the deep groan of a heavy weight forced into reluctant motion, then the ominous creak of metal that was changing temperature quickly. Sounds that she had never noticed before, because she had been suited, or because they had been masked by the endless dull roar of the engine core. Now the ship hung dead in deep space, with no sound in it but the opening of the airlock door.

There was a hiss that sounded to her like the blast of a tremendous whistle, then a black vertical line appeared between the doors, as thin as a hair, then wider. There was a rush of air that became a breeze that tugged gently at her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I wrote this, I had no idea that Jack can actually push a half-naked female Shepard face down into her own bed, kneel atop her, and ink her.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFPPsGBP9w8


	2. Alternate Ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The promised less-unhappy ending.

Even though Shepard had died once, some part of her still refused to accept that it could happen. Like anyone who served on a ship, she had nightmares about being spaced, but she never died in them. Always, she found herself miraculously able to breathe in hard vacuum. Bereft of any rational hope, she found herself wanting to believe that it would somehow happen this time too. 

She twisted her head, looking out the corner of her right eye at the slowly opening airlock door. Beyond was black night, unbroken by a single star.

Is this death? 

No, she realized, I still ache. All over.

And I can breathe.

The rush of wind had stopped. She took such a deep, sharp breath that her lungs gave a stab of protest. She let it out, slowly, and took another. There was plenty of air. She thought at first it was fresh and clean, but then she realized that was just her joy at being alive. In fact, it was rather stale.

No. It was awful. It stank, if anything, worse than the befouled airlock. And somehow she was sure she had smelled it before. Somewhere.

Worry, like a tiny burrowing worm, began to eat its way into her feeling of relief. 

She heard a sound - it was so low, she couldn't tell what it was - and it seemed to come out of the darkness behind her. She turned her head again, straining to see, and was startled to find that the empty space was no longer totally black. It was almost -

\- like a dark room as her eyes adjusted, she realized.

A voice blared out of the speaker overhead, making her jerk with fright.

"Shepard."

Her wide eyes turned to the speaker, fixed on it.

"No, you're not dead."

She recognized the voice.

"I might be vengeful, but I am not in the habit of simply throwing anything away. After your little temper tantrum on the Collector Base, I decided to cut my losses, sell you to the highest bidder, and recoup what I could. But first, I knew you would make a suitable bonus payment to the crew of the Normandy, after their many sacrifices."

She moaned.

"Vacuum is too easy a punishment for those who defy me." The Illusive Man went on. A hint of humor crept into his voice. "And besides, it didn't kill you. Neither will this. Hopefully."

She wrenched her body, trying again to see what was behind her, but she only gave herself several new jolts of pain. She slumped in her restraints, trembling.

"Shepard." It was a new voice, higher-pitched. Not coming from the speaker. From behind her.

"You never met me, but I owe you a great deal." It was a salarian voice, she realized.

"I was a lowly prison doctor, until you did me the favor of killing my boss. In the ensuing chaos, I was able to move into his position - after gathering allies and disposing of my foolish rivals, of course." The voice was smug. "Now I am the new warden."

The Illusive Man spoke for the last time. "Dr. Saleon has assured me that he'll keep you patched up for a long time to come. I'm afraid he'll have his hands full, but I wouldn't leave you in his care unless I put great trust in his ethics and integrity."

Through all of this, Shepard slowly became aware of another sound. It was the sound she had heard before either the Illusive Man or Dr. Saleon began speaking. It sounded like...some kind of rumbling.

No. Growling.

"Gentlemen," Dr. Saleon's voice rang out, "As thanks for your services, I present to you Purgatory's new prison whore, the butcher of Torfan and Bahak. She's all yours."

From somewhere behind him there came a mighty roar of several batarian voices. Then the bark of a varren, caught up in the excitement.

Shepard struggled anew, uselessly. She tried to scream through the gag, but the only sound that escaped was a high keening wail. She heard the thunder of many feet striking the deck, as the mob surged toward her.


End file.
